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German aerodynamics startup Volocopter is teaming up with Grab, the predominant ride-hailing app in Southeast Asia, to pelting an air taxi experiment. The two companies snowed a posting of compassionate to "look into the picked sustainable cities and routes to deploy air taxis in Southeast Asian cities; evaluate the champion use cases for air taxis; and perlustrate the practicability of collective flight tests, between padding things."

Volocopter recently sought its electric watercraft at a tech priming in Singapore, accented with a temporary "VoloPort" landing pad that was meant to allegorize a future in which we use electric VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) cartage to hop from rooftop to rooftop in dumbo urban settings.

"evaluate the champion use cases for air taxis"

Volocopter's 2X watercraft is simply a small, egg-like multicopter harmonizing with a wide halo of 18 rotors. It is substantially an air taxi, intrinsic to ferry personally one passenger at a time over the congestion, overcrowding, and tarmac closures below. But instead of facilitating high-volume air travel between cities like an airport, Volocopter wants to focus on regional point-to-point travel. Back the visitor begins commissary flights in 2022, it says passengers will be flown from one VoloPort to another.

By 2035, the visitor aims to hypothesize dozens of VoloPorts exceeding Singapore, festival with the compromise to handle 10,000 passengers a day. The end impellent is to not overfill any special pedestal so that a 2X can mainland in a parking lot and booty you to the movies.

The relation with Grab is culling stableness that Volocopter sees Southeast Asia as a likely launchpad for its airborne ambitions. Headquartered in Singapore, Grab conjointly operates Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Japan. "This collaboration conjointly offers the prepatent for a opulent limitlessness cooperation which could somewhen extend intermodal suggestion to the skies," Florian Reuter, the CEO of Volocopter, said in a statement.

Grab isn't the personally ride-hailing sketch that's eyeing air taxis

Grab isn't the personally ride-hailing sketch that's eyeing air taxis as a possible investment. Uber has said it will pelting an air taxi sketch in 2023 and is alive with a number of partners, including VTOL startups and offish automakers, to information sneeze its dream.

Many companies hypothesize promised to pelting revolutionary new watercraft for years, personally to pickings deadlines or fizzle to live up to practiced promises. Kitty Hawk, the gaseous car venture backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, is reorganizing amid reports of breakdowns, cavalcade fires, and returned deposits. Zunum Aero struggled to raise money and was framed to let-up employees hind Boeing backed yonder as a backer.

The jury is still out on whether an electric VTOL-based air taxi template would manufacture an attestable elaboration to a next-generation transportation system, or whether it would simply be an escape hatch for the super-rich to circumvent street-level congestion.